In this episode, Frankel fellow Oren Yirmiya explores how Hebrew writers have grappled with the gendered structure of Hebrew, exploring ways to express non-gendered or gender-fluid characters and concepts that work within and beyond conventional Hebrew.
In this episode, cultural historian and literary scholar Golan Moskowitz discusses his current book project, which explores the cultural history of Jewish drag and its relationship with Jewish identity in America. Through detailed analysis of significant figures such as Adah Isaacs Mencken, Flawless Sabrina, Harvey Fierstein, Charles Busch, Sadie Sadie the Rabbi Lady, and Sasha Velour, Moskowitz highlights how Jewishness and drag have intertwined to challenge social norms and reflect shifting cu...
In this captivating episode, host Jeremy Shere from Connversa speaks with Marce Gutierrez, a research fellow at the National University of Salta in Argentina. Marce shares her unique perspective as a trans woman and an anthropologist, studying the interconnected histories of Jewish and LGBTQ+ persecution in Argentina. She delves into the story of Rabbi Marshall Meyer, a key figure during Argentina's turbulent 20th century, and how the violent legacy against marginalized groups spans from the ear...
In this episode, we explore the work of Raphael Rachel Neis, a professor of ancient history at the University of Michigan, whose book, When a Human Gives Birth to a Raven, delves into ancient rabbinic understandings of reproduction and identity, focusing on how the rabbis of the Talmud viewed the emergence of new life. The book aims to reveal a more complex, varied, and open ancient world, countering the traditional Judeo-Christian perspectives on family, reproduction, and identity.
In this episode, historian Dr. Anna Hejkova from the University of Warwick explores rarely discussed queer histories and enforced relationships during the Holocaust. The narrative delves into the lives of concentration camp guard Anneliese Kohlmann; Helene Sommer, a female prisoner who Kohlmann forced into a relationship; Margot Heumann, a teenage prisoner who witnessed the relationship; and Willie Brachmann, a kapo in Auschwitz. Shedding light on the complex dynamics, power imbalances, and surv...
In this episode, Debora Kantor, a lecturer at the National University of San Martin, Buenos Aires, discusses her research on the representation of Jews and Jewishness in Argentine modern and contemporary cinema. She delves into her specific project on Argentine nonfiction films about Israel, examining how these films reflect both collective and personal understandings of Jewish identity. The discussion includes her analysis of autobiographical turns in contemporary Argentine cinema and the trans...
In this episode, we explore the fascinating history of the Jewish Museum in New York City. From its humble beginnings in 1904 as a small collection of ceremonial objects to its current status as a renowned institution grappling with questions of identity and purpose, the museum's story is one of constant evolution and debate. We discuss the museum's origins and early years, including the significant contributions of Cyrus Adler and the impact of the Holocaust on its collection. We delve into the...
The history of European fashion typically focuses on singular, Christian European geniuses who conjured bold designs and created cutting-edge garments. But in Paris in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Jews from the Middle East and North Africa played important roles in shaping European tastes in fashion. In this episode, Devi Mays, an associate professor of Judaic Studies and history at the University of Michigan, and Julia Phillips Cohen, an associate professor of Jewish Studies and hist...
From Gold Mountain to Tinseltown: Ethnic Identity in California’s Architectural Vernacular It’s well known that millions of Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe immigrated across the Atlantic to the United States, settling mostly in New York and other large cities. But some Jewish immigrants crossed the Pacific and settled on the West Coast of the United States, in cities such as San Francisco and Los Angeles. In this episode, we explore the research of Zoya Blumberg-Kraus, an independent schol...
Jews are no strangers to horror. They’ve encountered and dealt with horrifying events throughout their history - exile, destruction of two temples, expulsion, blood libels, ghettoization, genocide, terrorism. The list goes on and on. And so, it’s perhaps not surprising that Jewish critics and filmmakers have done some really interesting work in the horror film genre, creating what scholar Adam Lowenstein refers to as Jewish horror, although what that term means, exactly, is complicated. In this ...
The rise of the Nazis and their antisemitic agenda during the early 1930s was the beginning of the darkest era of modern Jewish history. For obvious reasons, we tend to not make jokes about it. And yet, at the time, some Jewish writers and artists, including photographers, did exactly that. In this episode, Louis Kaplan, a professor of visual studies and art history at the University of Toronto, and a fellow at the Frankel Center for Advanced Jewish Studies at the University of Michigan, explore...
2023-24 Frankel Institute "Jewish Visual Cultures" Today's Guest: Deborah Dash Moore Project Title: “Camera as Passport” During the 1930s, ‘40, and ‘50s, throughout the great depression and into the post-WWII era, photographers who were members of the NY Photo League, many of whom were Jews, documented working-class street life in New York City. And without quite realizing it at the time, they pioneered a new form of photography. In this episode, University of Michigan historian and Jewish Studi...
Since the earliest years of the modern state of Israel, Jews from Arab and Muslim lands, known as Mizrahim, have had to fight for equal rights and opportunities. Mizrahi Jews were looked down upon by the Zionist establishment as primitive–in many ways the very opposite of the image of the New, Western-style Jew that the establishment hoped to foster. And so, Mizrahi activists have for decades struggled to be recognized as full and equal members of Israeli society. But often lost among the larger...
Like most Jews living in Muslim lands, the Jews of Algeria had over the centuries built a vibrant culture, with homegrown traditions, institutions, and religious practices. Tying it all together was the Algerian Jewish community’s unique dialect of Judeo-Arabic, which rendered Arabic in Hebrew script–much like Yiddish, a German dialect written in Hebrew, spoken by Jews of Eastern Europe. For centuries, the Algerian dialect of Judeo-Arabic was spoken and written by Jews as an everyday language, a...
Mizrahiyut, or Mizrahi identity and consciousness, is an Israeli phenomenon, born in the decades after hundreds of thousands of Jews from Arab and North African lands immigrated to Israel. But recently, a version of Mizrahi identity has taken root in the United States among the sons and daughters of Mizrahi Jews who have relocated to America. In this episode of Frankely Judaic, scholar and Frankel Institute fellow Gal Levy discussed this burgeoning of Mizrahi identity in the US, exploring how an...
During the late 1940s and early 1950s, the fledgling State of Israel scrambled to accommodate a flood of Jewish immigrants from war-torn Europe and from the Middle East and North Africa. The Middle Eastern and North African Jews, who came to be known as Mizrahi, or Eastern, Jews, were seen as backwards and primitive by the Zionist establishment. Two events exemplify this attitude: the Yemenite Childrens Affair, wherein the children of Yemenite Jewish families were taken by Israeli hospitals for ...
2022-23 Frankel Institute: Mizrahim and the Politics of Ethnicity Project Title: Mizrahim and the Local Politics of Ethnicity in Development Towns If you’ve ever visited Israel, you most likely spent some time in Jerusalem, Tel Aviv, maybe also Haifa and Eilat. But chances are you didn’t go to places like Sderot, Ofakim, and Kiryat Shmona–development towns that are typically poorer and less glamorous than Israel’s larger and more famous cities. But while development towns may not attract many to...
2021-22 Frankel Institute Second Temple Judaism: The Challenge of Diversity Fellow, Catherine Bonesho Project Title: Gentile Rulers in the Early Jewish Imagination
2021-22 Frankel Institute Second Temple Judaism: The Challenge Diversity Fellow, Rodney Caruthers Project Title: Judaism and its Practice Beyond Rivers
2021-2022 Frankel Institute Second Temple Judaism: The Challenge of Diversity Fellow, Alexei Sivertsev "Construction of Jewish Identities in 2nd Temple Period"
2021-22 Frankel Institute Second Temple Judaism: The Challenge of Diversity Fellow, Liane Feldman Project Title: The Myth of Cultic Centralization in Second Temple Judaism
2021-22 Frankel Institute Second Temple Judaism: The Challenge of Diversity M Tong Line 3: Project Title: "Circumcision and Bodily Discourse"
2021-22 Frankel Institute Second Temple Judaism: The Challenge of Diversity Fellow, Oren Ableman Project Title: Resistance to Rome in Second Temple Literature
2021-2022 Second Temple Judaism: The Challenge of Diversity Fellow, Gregg E. Gardner Project Title: "Digging Up Judaism: Archaeology, Diversity, and Material Religion in the 2nd Temple Era"
2021-22 Frankel Institute Second Temple Judaism: The Challenge of Diversity Fellow, Mark Leuchter Project Title: So Let It Be Written: Persian Imperial Myth and the Formation of Early Jewish Textual Identity
2020-21 Frankel Institute Translating Jewish Cultures Fellow, Lucia Finotto Project Title: Republic of Scholars: Jewish Translators in Medieval Sicily
2020-21 Frankel Institute Translating Jewish Cultures Fellow, Maya Barzilai Project Title: Love and the Zionist Translation Project
2020-21 Frankel Institute Translating Jewish Cultures Fellow, Alex Moshkin Project Title: Russian-Israeli Poetry
2020-21 Frankel Institute Translating Jewish Cultures Fellow, Oren Kosansky Project Title: Jews, Alcohol, and Moroccan Mahia
2020-21 Frankel Institute Translating Jewish Cultures Fellow, Roni Masel Project Title: How Jews Became Modern Readers
